I am just curious to know if someone has moved away from Arch and towards Gentoo or vice versa.
I am caught in the middle right now. I plan on purchasing a laptop early next year and not sure whether or not to install Arch Linux or Gentoo Linux.

Not sure which one will best be suited for a laptop. By the way I have been to the Arch Linux forums and they have mostly complained about how long it takes to compile and set up a system like Gentoo.

If you can tell me a story on why you switched to either Gentoo or Arch. That would help in my decision. Thank you for your time.

Both have their pro's and con's.
My desktop has stayed Gentoo since I switched to it in 2003 and unless it /really/ stalls in dev I shall stay.
I have had another box go from Arch -> Gentoo simply because Arch and its binary nature is ANAL sometimes (there are a few threads here and on the arch forums where I have mentions some stupid decisions arch have chosen)
Likewise I have Arch on my eeepc (since it makes sense there)_________________The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter
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I used Arch linux a long time ago, but I prefer Gentoo because of the idea of choice. I can build what I want with Gentoo and I didn't had that with Arch._________________Sysadmin of GentooQuébec.org Wiki Signature
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I used Arch linux a long time ago, but I prefer Gentoo because of the idea of choice. I can build what I want with Gentoo and I didn't had that with Arch.

Actually I don't have a laptop right now. Just an older desktop that was a hand me down. The most I am looking to spend on a laptop for next year is $600. I hope I can get a good reliable brand at that price.

Right now the only thing that concerns me right now with Gentoo are the long compiling times. I imagine if you have a beefy computer it can be shorter compiling times but not sure about a $600 laptop.

Should I be concerned about the compiling times? I guess I should I play around with both and see which one I like better. That would take a while but I think it's worth it.

I agree with trying them both out and seeing which one you like better. With Arch I missed the USE flags right away... still do, but it is worth it for me for updates. When I used the laptop for school I could update gentoo while in class so the compile times weren't too much of a problem.

While I've never left Gentoo since I started using it, I have from time to time given Arch a go, especially on a laptop. But I've given up and returned to using Gentoo every time. In terms of stability it is like ~arch on Gentoo. Sometimes things break. The problem with Arch is that there is no straightforward way to downgrade, and certainly not anything officially supported. They don't have multiple versions of a package in their repositories like we have on Gentoo.

Then there is also the issue of no useflags, which is one of Gentoo's power features, and a lower number of packages available. Yes, AUR is useful, but the build tool is considerably slower than portage. And if I end up compiling multiple packages from source anyway, I might as well use Gentoo...

If you are looking for a binary distro (because it's quicker to update), I suggest you give Sabayon a try._________________"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln
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While I've never left Gentoo since I started using it, I have from time to time given Arch a go, especially on a laptop. But I've given up and returned to using Gentoo every time. In terms of stability it is like ~arch on Gentoo. Sometimes things break. The problem with Arch is that there is no straightforward way to downgrade, and certainly not anything officially supported. They don't have multiple versions of a package in their repositories like we have on Gentoo.

Then there is also the issue of no useflags, which is one of Gentoo's power features, and a lower number of packages available. Yes, AUR is useful, but the build tool is considerably slower than portage. And if I end up compiling multiple packages from source anyway, I might as well use Gentoo...

If you are looking for a binary distro (because it's quicker to update), I suggest you give Sabayon a try.

Which useflags do you find useful on a laptop and I am assuming you use it for normal graphical use?

Assuming that arch binaries are compiled with support for just about everything I am more interested in what you would leave out and how you would find that useful for desktop use. For instance what do you gain by leaving out qt and kde support?

I moved from Arch to Gentoo as I found that, installation apart, Arch is almost as time-consuming as Gentoo, if you take into account the time that you have to spend actively working to maintain your system (ie. not background compiling). Also Arch is not as flexible as Gentoo and cannot mach Gentoo QA. On the other hand Arch has a much simpler architecture so it's quite easy to tune it.

In any case I don't see any reason to prefer Arch over Gentoo: the only downside of Gentoo is that it can be really time-consuming, but Arch is not really much better from this point of view. So if maintenance time is a concern I would go for something else like Fedora (I am using it on my new laptop and I am quite happy with that, but will stick with Gentoo for my desktop).

I switched to Arch after failing to get the Arduino IDE running ( I wrote a fair chunk of the wiki page for it) and one dev telling me to fix the Firefox code because 2 versions in a row were segfaulting for me.

Last edited by regomodo on Thu Dec 31, 2009 8:15 pm; edited 1 time in total

In any case I don't see any reason to prefer Arch over Gentoo: the only downside of Gentoo is that it can be really time-consuming, but Arch is not really much better from this point of view. So if maintenance time is a concern I would go for something else like Fedora (I am using it on my new laptop and I am quite happy with that, but will stick with Gentoo for my desktop).

I use Gentoo on my desktop and Arch on my laptop. Arch is very impressive with a great community. However, I can't say I love some of its configs and pacman still has some green in it. I think in a year to two it can be a truly great distro.

Gentoo is my first love though and portage is too good so it will remain on my desktop and stay my everyday OS._________________--Aaron

So when you are using a binary distro the slower linking makes you miss use flags and causes you to come back to gentoo?

Nope, I just prefer Gentoo's reasonably clean and usable default environment. You asked what gain may come from leaving out support for foo, I gave one.

I asked in the context of what you would gain in leaving from a binary desktop distro. In response to someone who did because they missed use flags. So your unnoticeable gain doesn't answer my question at all.

I switched to Arch from OpenSuse when I discovered I could build up my system to whatever I wanted, instead of chiseling out cruft from existing distro. But then...

Then I discovered Gentoo and USE flags.....

I tried installing Arch recently, when I needed quick lightweight install on a PC, but pacman now seems lightyears behind emerge. It was also broken in a way, packages that error'd on download would not be repeated so I had to hunt down missing libs, plus installing KDE for instance, where you manually select KDE packages, requires you to pass through entire selection process again, and again, and again after each such error.

There is nothing like the USE flags.

Compile times? Yeah, it's a pain installing on new machine, especially on an older one, but once installed, the updates can compile in the background, you don't ever notice them (set proper NICENESS, a fast mirror, portage download speed, etc... for best results).

Compile times? Yeah, it's a pain installing on new machine, especially on an older one, but once installed, the updates can compile in the background, you don't ever notice them (set proper NICENESS, a fast mirror, portage download speed, etc... for best results).

In fact, once installed, Gentoo can run without any updates if you want too, but Gentoo is like a race car, we always want to tweak it to gain extra something, it's the Geek way _________________Sysadmin of GentooQuébec.org Wiki Signature
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